ABSTRACT
Beginning with The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, 1905 extended his understanding of the unconscious mind. He did so by using the insights that he had gained from the psychoanalysis of neurotic patients. Starting with the observation that neurosis is an unconscious defense against intolerable experience, Freud looked at a variety of normal phenomena, such as slips of the tongue, which had previously been thought to be accidental, and he demonstrated that dreaming, neurotic symptoms, and Freudian slips all follow an orderly process where there is a release, or a blocking (repression), of thoughts and emotion followed by a failure of the repression. In parallel to these kinds of experience, during my training to become a psychodynamic psychotherapist, I had several experiences that, at the time, I did not understand. I have presented several of these experiences because the essence of my so-called magic is that I have taught myself how to listen to a person’s clinical experiences, understand, decode, make meaning of, and, finally, translate that meaning to the other.
